In conclusion I wish to say a word to this body, containing as it does so many business men, upon what is preeminently a business proposition, and that is the proper national supervision and control of corporations. At the meeting of the American Bar Association in this last August, Judge Charles F. Amidon, of North Dakota, read a paper on the Nation and the Constitution so admirable that it is deserving of very wide study; for what he said was, as all studies of law in its highest form ought to be, a contribution to constructive jurisprudence as it should be understood not only by judges but by legislators, not only by those who interpret and decide the law, but by those who make it and who administer or execute it. He quoted from the late Justice Miller, of the Supreme Court, to show that even in the interpretation of the Constitution by this, the highest authority of the land, the court’s successive decisions must be tested by the way they work in actual application to the National life; the court adding to its thought and study the results of experience and observation until the true solution is evolved by a process both of inclusion and exclusion. Said Justice Miller: “The meaning of the Constitution is to be sought as much in the National life as in the dictionary;” for, as has been well said, government purely out of a law library can never be really good government. Now that the questions of government are becoming so largely economic, the majority of our so-called constitutional cases really turn not upon the interpretation of the instrument itself, but upon the construction, the right apprehension of the living conditions to which it is to be applied. The Constitution is now and must remain what it always has been; but it can only be interpreted as the interests of the whole people demand, if interpreted as a living organism, designed to meet the conditions of life and not of death; in other words, if interpreted as Marshall interpreted it, as Wilson declared it should be interpreted. The Marshall theory, the theory of life and not of death, allows to the Nation, that is to the people as a whole, when once it finds a subject within the national cognizance, the widest and freest choice of methods for national control, and sustains every exercise of national power which has any reasonable relation to national objects. The negation of this theory means, for instance, that the Nation――that we, the ninety millions of people of this country――will be left helpless to control the huge corporations which now domineer in our industrial life, and that they will have the authority of the courts to work their desires unchecked; and such a decision would in the end be as disastrous for them as for us. If the theory of the Marshall school prevails, then an immense field of national power, now unused, will be developed, which will be adequate for dealing with many, if not all, of the economic problems which vex us; and we shall be saved from the